About a minute into the second round of Saturday’s welterweight
megafight, Manny Pacquiao leaned against the ropes and let Miguel
Angel Cotto hit him. It went against everything he had been taught in his storied career, and his cornermen were furious. Cotto is a concussive slugger from Puerto Rico, and a few of the blows hit Pacquiao, a cultural icon in Asia, square in the chin. “Just testing his power,” Pacquiao would say later.

As it turned out, the blows didn’t faze Pacquiao, a 144-pounder. Soon the PacMan, as he is called, slipped away from Cotto and started to brutalize the man. He put the Puerto Rican on the canvas twice. For most of the bout, Cotto’s face was a bloody, bloated mess, and his white trunks were stained red from his own blood. Pacquiao is so fast that he can dive into a fighter’s punching range, deliver a head-snapping blow, and then dart outside again. It is beautiful to behold. Pacquiao’s artistry in the ring is being compared to Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. He is the best fighter of his generation, maybe ever.

I, along with two-thirds of Asia, had been fantasizing about this moment for months, and as I sat ringside, and watched Pacquiao in the ring, it felt like the sport mattered again.

My journey to the fight began two years ago. I was chatting
with Freddie Roach, Pacquiao’s trainer. We were in his gym, which was once an anonymous Hollywood rat hole but lately has become a hip place for celebrities and the thousands of Pacquiao fans who linger outside to catch a glimpse of their demigod. Roach’s eyes lit up when he told me about Pacquiao, “the most exciting fighter in the world today.” Roach, who suffers from Parkinson’s, is the world’s best trainer and a person to trust. So I started studying the Filipino boxer.

Since the American media gave up on boxing long ago, I
followed Pacquiao through the Filipino papers, and on televised
bouts. His skills in vanquishing the boxing stars Oscar De La Hoya (who received such a beating that he retired) and Ricky Hatton (who was dropped cold by a devastating Pacquiao punch) were astounding works of pugilism. Pacquiao, 5-foot-6, has gained 40 pounds since the start of his boxing career, but even as he put on the weight he was able to flummox two of the sports brightest stars with his speed and engineered power. Boxing historians, or what’s left of them, were astounded that Pacquiao could win six different weight classes. The fight against Cotto, the reigning welterweight champ, would give Pacquiao a chance at an unprecedented seventh belt.

I had been wanting to see Pacquiao live. Watching a fighter in person, instead of just on television, can give a sense of the fighter’s speed and a feel for the weight of the punches. In press row you can hear the gloves strike the flesh, which usually sounds like push-push-push. I have been to fights, even championship ones, but I have never seen such fist speed
coupled with such power. Pacquiao's punches are still resonating in my ears.

Before the main event, I sat down in the press row and took in the undercard. There were a lot of media people, as usual, mostly from overseas. I talked with Larry Merchant, the HBO analyst, who had sent a contentious letter a couple weeks earlier to Tom Jolly of the New York Times complaining about the paper’s lack of boxing coverage. Jolly had countered that the sport is disorganized and not important. I find boxing’s disorganization and corruption rather entertaining and intriguing; it is an antidote to the corporatization of American sports—tightly controlled entities that relentlessly and neatly package their athletes, stories, games, and merchandise.

The undercard was tedious, except that Yuri Foreman, a Brooklynite from Israel who is known as the Fighting Rabbi, had won his match and was now the WBA Superwelter Weight champion. “I want to thank God for giving me strength, we are tough people in Israel, and my Arab friends were sending me messages on Facebook saying that they were praying for me to Allah,” said Foreman. Soon the crowd started chanting, and Miguel Cotto and his entourage approached the ring. Cotto was a 3-to-1 underdog but he looked confident and very serious. Cotto had only lost one fight, 16 months ago, a controversial one to Antonio
Margarito, who many suspect had put an illegal, hard substance in his gloves. "I am pretty recovered from the Margarito defeat," Cotto, 28, had told an interviewer before the fight.

Then it was Pacquiao’s turn to make the ritual entrance. Behind him was Freddie Roach, shaking from his Parkinson’s tremors, caused by his own journeyman boxing career. Pacquiao looked relaxed and in shape. It was mid-afternoon in the Philippines, and I was sure the entire country was glued to the TV. Many Filipinos, including the vice president, had made the trip to Vegas because Pacquiao represents so much them. He was abandoned by his father (a man who ate the family dog) and then
he left home at 14 to help support his family. He sold snacks and trinkets on the streets. He once lived in a cardboard box.
He boxed his way to fame and fortune with fights in his homeland and abroad. (His father was somewhere in the arena tonight, watching his son for the first time.) Said a Filipino sportswriter, “We are having hard times in our country. There is terrorism. There is poverty. There are kidnappings every day. We find solace in Manny Pacquiao.” There is even talk of him running for congress. In a country with thousands of different dialects and ethnic groups, Filipinos see him as a unifier.

The judges gave the first round to Cotto. But Pacquiao started letting loose in the second. “He hit harder than we expected and he was stronger than we expected,” said Cotto’s trainer, Joe Santiago. Pacquiao knocked down Cotto once in the third and again in the fourth. Pacquiao’s punches came from different angles: straight lefts, hooks, undercuts, combinations. MANNY! MANNY! As the fight wore on, Cotto started backpedaling. MANNY! MANNY! Pacquiao would repeatedly strike Cotto’s once handsome face, which was puffy with blood streaming everywhere. He looked dead-eyed and morose, but he refused to quit. For some reason or other, it made me sad to watch him. “If I was in his corner, I would have thrown in the towel in the ninth round,” Roach told me after the fight. “They should have had compassion for him.”

In the 12th round, 55 seconds in, the referee called the fight a TKO. Before being rushed to the hospital, Cotto stopped to console his mother, who was weeping in his corner.

Pacquiao’s team held him in the air. Pacquiao smiled, winked, and
talked about his gratitude to his fans, and how he would be singing at a concert that night at the Mandalay Bay. Most of the post-fight talk centered on Pacquiao’s next potential match, a fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr., a bombastic, unbeaten American, which could be one of the biggest fight’s of all time, if it can be arranged. For now, Pacquiao will return to the Philippines to spend time with his family, and boxing will wait for his encore.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Even when they’re adopted, the children of the wealthy grow up to be just as well-off as their parents.

Lately, it seems that every new study about social mobility further corrodes the story Americans tell themselves about meritocracy; each one provides more evidence that comfortable lives are reserved for the winners of what sociologists call the birth lottery. But, recently, there have been suggestions that the birth lottery’s outcomes can be manipulated even after the fluttering ping-pong balls of inequality have been drawn.

What appears to matter—a lot—is environment, and that’s something that can be controlled. For example, one study out of Harvard found that moving poor families into better neighborhoods greatly increased the chances that children would escape poverty when they grew up.

While it’s well documentedthat the children of the wealthy tend to grow up to be wealthy, researchers are still at work on how and why that happens. Perhaps they grow up to be rich because they genetically inherit certain skills and preferences, such as a tendency to tuck away money into savings. Or perhaps it’s mostly because wealthier parents invest more in their children’s education and help them get well-paid jobs. Is it more nature, or more nurture?

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.